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Our American cousins just spent $6 billion on an election in which nothing changed. Literally.

Barack Obama is still the Democratic president of the United States.

The Democrats still control the Senate.

The Republicans still control the House of Representatives.

And that means the U.S. is dangerously ill-equipped to deal with exactly the same financial crisis it faced prior to Tuesday ’s election.

This is the urgent need to raise the U.S. government’s debt ceiling above $16.4 trillion by early next year — requiring the consent of both the Republican House and Democratic Senate — in order for the U.S. to avoid defaulting on its payments to foreign creditors, led by China.

If the two parties can’t agree on allowing the U.S. government to borrow more money, it will hurl the U.S. and global economies into chaos, trigger a global recession and send the cost of borrowing skyrocketing.

Republicans and Democrats tried and failed to reach a substantive deal on raising the debt ceiling in July, 2011 — mainly because the Democrats only wanted to raise taxes while the Republicans only wanted to cut spending — in order to get the U.S. deficit under control.

Instead, they imposed a temporary fix and mutually agreed to kick the can down the road until after Tuesday ’s election.

Now it has to be resolved or the U.S. could do the unthinkable — default on its debt payments.

While it’s hard to imagine either party being that insane, chillingly, they almost were in 2011.

As Bob Woodward reveals in his book on the 2011 fiscal crisis, The Price of Politics, at one point the U.S. Treasury was almost down to its last $5 billion — enough to run the federal government for half a day.

The Democrats blamed Republican intransigence, citing, for example, a 2010 comment by Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to the National Journal that: “The single most important thing we (the Republicans) want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

Change, not failure

While it’s true the Republicans were half the problem, Woodward notes that when McConnell was asked whether this meant there would be nothing but confrontation with Obama, McConnell replied: “If President Obama does a Clintonian backflip, if he’s willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it’s not inappropriate for us to do business with him ... I don’t want the president to fail, I want him to change.”

Obviously, in context, McConnell’s statement, is less controversial than it first appears. That said, it was hardly statesmanlike.

As for Obama and the Democrats — and despite Obama’s countless proclamations, then and now, that he wants to be bi-partisan — they didn’t have clean hands, either.

As Woodward notes, their attitude when Obama took over the White House in 2009 was best summed up by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s then chief of staff, now mayor of Chicago, whose approach towards negotiating with the Republicans was: “We have the votes. F---’em.”

Isn’t it wonderful to know the fate of the global economy, rests on the willingness of people like this — Republicans and Democrats — to put their political differences aside for the common good?

Maybe the Mayans were right. Maybe the world will end Dec. 21 , which is just about when the U.S. debt ceiling needs to be raised.